Just a quick thanks for helping roll back so much of the vandalism. Per your recent log comment, yes, there has been a recent spate of vandalism; before yesterday, it was the odd spammer that I've had to remove. But with the advent of Click and Drag, there's also been an insurgence of ip-based vandalism. I'm hoping this is just a spike owing to the popularity of the comic, but I'm with you; if it doesn't die down, something more drastic is going to have to be done.

Please don't

Please don't create the redirects to explanations that haven't been created yet. It breaks the next and previous buttons, and gives people that are browsing through the explanations the false impression that the site is more complete than it is. lcarsos (talk) 06:41, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

Davidy22, the spam connoisseur

Congratulations on transcending from being annoyed at all spam to recognizing the truly beautiful works of spammage from the rest of the cruddy heap. We should throw a party, lol. lcarsos (talk) 16:33, 1 November 2012 (UTC)

Hey, it *was* a well written bit of spam. It was one of those copy/paste types of spam, except it was nicely formatted and coherent all the way through. It was informative too. A great change from the mindless template drivel or gibberish that we usually get. Davidy22(talk) 23:11, 1 November 2012 (UTC)

Just asking

Was there a reason you deleted most of the List of all comics? lcarsos (talk) 05:21, 11 November 2012 (UTC)

What on- shi-

I was adding comic number 1132, and the preview was really slow, so I copied everything in the edit box and refreshed the page. I think half of the page hadn't finished loading in the edit box, and I only copied the first half. Derp Davidy22(talk) 08:21, 11 November 2012 (UTC)

I figured it was something like that. lcarsos (talk) 04:56, 12 November 2012 (UTC)

Just so you know, it happened again. But SlashMe fixed it. lcarsos_a (talk) 18:07, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

The Anonymous editor of 1132

Has been 50.0.38.245 all along. For a while he changed his signature to be a userpage that didn't exist, and wasn't a registered user. He has now changed it back to being the IP address again. Just thought I should do some out-of-band communication about that. If you want to change your last comment about the anonymous user, that would be good. (I almost offered to edit it for you, but then realized the subject we're talking about, and decided that if 50.0 ever learns about looking at the edit history and diffs, I don't need to be called a hypocrite as well as a banhammer wielding BOFH) lcarsos_a (talk) 03:35, 15 November 2012 (UTC)

Broken mirror...

Sorry for the "ninja"... I guess we probably don't need 2 versions of the image though... Feel free to distill the explain part...--B. P. (talk) 07:15, 19 November 2012 (UTC)

Godammit, I even had the window open waiting for the article. The definitions can be merged into one paragraph, and wiki magic will explain how the comic works. Davidy22(talk) 07:20, 19 November 2012 (UTC)

Fooooooooor He's a Jolly Good Fellow...

You are the man, man. Keep it up! lcarsos_a (talk) 06:50, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

Please take a look

...at this. Nothing new to you, I suppose (spam fighting can be quite hard if we're overly cautious on every step), but I'm dropping the note just in case :) --Waldir (talk) 17:52, 25 November 2012‎ (UTC)

autoblocking suspicious users

Once again, it looks like auto-blocking users that have suspicious usernames would require someone with more power than we have.

However, I very nearly blocked those three when I noticed the account creation. But, I didn't because I thought they might be legitimate users with stupid usernames. But now I've read up on Wikipedia's block policy and from now on I'll be posting {{uw-blockindef}} (which I've bungled fantastically right now, but shortly should be working) which should allow the rare legitimate user (with bad taste in usernames) to reclaim their good account, but allow us to block bad people.

Hum. A great many of these templates could be condensed into a few bigger ones, but at least the documentation links are there for us to use. Also, you do know that Template:UserBox already exists, right? Davidy22[talk] 04:55, 4 December 2012 (UTC)

Well, crud. You switched, I switched. I do like the one we had better, mostly because of the descriptive labels and the nice thick borders. The name's in convenient CamelCase too. Davidy22[talk] 05:18, 4 December 2012 (UTC)

As a general rule I loathe my shift key, using more keys to achieve the same goal is wasted time, and I could be called ruthless about wasted time. Saving a single keypress seems petty. But I had a CS professor point out that by specially crafting what you have to type (creating shortcuts) saving a keypress here and there can add up to saving several thousand keypresses every 8 hours, which over a long enough quantity of time can equal hours and days. That's my long winded explanation for why I like using {{userbox}} instead of {{UserBox}}.

Also, I like the wikipedia userboxen, it's more flexible. And that allows anyone who comes over from Wikipedia to know how to work userboxen here too. That's my case for it. I hope you agree because I don't want to have to push my shift key, but I'll take your input, and if we end up in a tie, we might ask Waldir to tie break for us, as he'd be a neutral third party. lcarsos_a (talk) 06:44, 4 December 2012 (UTC)

In CS, I learned that descriptive variable names and easy to recognize naming conventions can save heaps of debugging time. I personally like the CamelCase version better because it uses variable names like left-bg instead of id-c for the background color in the box on the left, which makes the template self-documenting and easier to grok for a new user who's just reading the source. Davidy22[talk] 07:58, 4 December 2012 (UTC)

I was asked to comment. Here are my thoughts:

Regarding CamelCase, it is indeed a neat convention but we don't use it elsewhere on the wiki. In fact, MediaWiki itself, in its early versions, used to rely on CamelCase for linking, but moved to the free-form, space enabled link syntax, which is better in many cases. Not everything converts nicely into CamelCase. So while I appreciate the argument to use CamelCase as the template name, I think the regular case version fits the wiki better. Besides, redirects are cheap and work well, so if the CamelCase title redirects to the lowercase one, whoever wants to use the CamelCase version can still do so seamlessly. Not an issue, therefore.

I agree with Davidy22 on the parameter names. In fact, the code of the template can be arranged in a more readable form (using whitespace and indentation) so not only its uses can be deciphered, but the template itself too. Renaming parameters is a simple matter, especially for templates with not many uses as these are, which means there isn't a lot of replacements to perform.

Sounds good to me. The wikicode looks god-awful ugly though, who's up for cleaning that thing up? Davidy22[talk] 00:03, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

If you guys do the merge, I can clean it up afterwards :) --Waldir (talk) 01:14, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

separate section for title text

I agree that in the two instances you removed the section header for the title text, it wasn't justified, but in some cases it does make sense. See here. Cheers, Waldir (talk) 15:27, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

No more imagesize

I made a comment on Template Talk: comic#Imagesize, essentially imagesize isn't necessary, and I've changed the {{create}} template to not include it. So rejoice, and forget imagesize ever existed (until the bug gets fixed). lcarsos_a (talk) 03:02, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

Bah, what was that parameter good for anyways? Clicking on the image should take you to the XKCD site anyways. What user cares about the image pages that the template currently takes you to? Davidy22[talk] 06:20, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

That's an interesting point. It's technically doable. But I think there should be a way to access the comic images (granted, I'm not sure why exactly, but I'm not comfortable leaving them "orphans" —linkless— either) --Waldir (talk) 12:08, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

There's the list of all comics page, and we could make the titletext link to the image page or something. I dunno, any excuse to kill imagesize. Davidy22[talk] 12:16, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

To clarify, linking the image directly to xkcd has nothing to do with killing imagesize. That, for what I understand, has already been done. Good point about the list of comics page. I'll wait for more comments before implementing the change in the image link target. --Waldir (talk) 12:35, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

Tools

It seems you are using noscript, which is stopping our project wonderful ads from working. Explain xkcd uses ads to pay for bandwidth, and we manually approve all our advertisers, and our ads are restricted to unobtrusive images and slow animated GIFs. If you found this site helpful, please consider whitelisting us.